Introduction
A story appeared recently (Friday 13 May) in the Guardian (‘Global hit Pasoori opens doors for Pakistani pop’), in the print edition the title was ‘Break through beat: Pakistanis and Indians united by dancefloor hit’. It was a story with a global resonance for it had previously made similar headlines in many newspapers of the world. The New Yorker magazine had run the item on May 9 under the title ‘The Pop Song That’s Uniting India and Pakistan’. The attraction of the story was its feel good flavour based on how a cultural product containing elements taken from several cultures could promote unity between peoples who had been otherwise politically divided. Shades perhaps of Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said’s West–Eastern Divan Orchestra.
It looked like a good basis from which to develop some thoughts that have been occurring to me, on and off, for many years now out of my experience of teaching students of diverse cultural backgrounds at the University of East London. I had come to the view that the way the concept of multiculturalism, so dear to liberal opinion and the Guardian, had been interpreted to inform public policy in the era of Tony Blair was severely flawed and had profoundly nefarious consequences which contributed to the growth of the influence of the far right in the old industrial working class communities of East London. It has resurfaced more recently as a major target in the context of the ‘culture wars’. I felt the need to develop a critique of the concept. The Guardian story might provide a basis to deepen the thoughts, so I pursued it. I thought we needed a new concept that would better create an image of the kind of cultural creation depicted in the story and its positive connotations.
In this post, I first introduce the Guardian story. It will later be used as vehicle to address the relationship between the concepts of multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and globalisation. Here, I will also refer to the personal experiences that have led me to question whether multiculturalism is as positive a concept as liberal opinion has led us to believe and critique the way it has been applied to inform policy. Its intellectual roots are also examined.
In a subsequent post, I intend to compare and contrast the concept of multiculturalism to that of cosmopolitanism and relate both concepts to that of globalisation. Conclusions will be drawn by using the discussion developed to analyse the various aspect of the Guardian story.
The story as presented in the Guardian and other media outlets
The Guardian story highlights how a song by a Pakistani singer Ali Sethi became a hit first in Pakistan, soon after in India too and then a global hit with more than 111 million views of its YouTube video. The song ‘which draws on traditional and modern musical influences… was the first Pakistani song to top Spotify’s global viral charts, and the first Pakistani song to enter its official global songs chart’. Also,
‘Sethi, a classically trained musician as well as a singer, composer and fiction author, has grown to be one of Pakistan’s most popular pop stars, though having lived in the US for the past five years he has said he sees himself more as a “diasporic voice”’.
The Guardian had no hesitation in describing the song as a ‘Pakistani song’. However, later in the story we learn that Sethi wrote the song with an overt political purpose of undermining the perceived divisions between the two nations, to emphasise the common roots of their cultures and the way they have interacted and enriched each other. Beyond that, Sethi has stated that his intention was to display “the Turkic, Indic, Arab, Persian, and…the global placeless, ubiquitous ‘beats’ vibe that is also our inheritance”. Featured prominently in the music video which presents the song is a mix of traditional and Western instruments, including a set of drums that would be found in a rock band, a Spanish guitar and a synthesizer. This underlines Sethi’s self-description in the Guardian report as a product of the Pakistani diaspora rather than a Pakistani.
The video opens with a dance performance led by veteran Pakistani dancer Sheema Kirmani, who has been described as a ‘not only a Bharatanatyam Classical Dancer but … also a social mobilizer, a feminist’. Quotes of her views include: “for arts to flourish, you must have freedom of expression” and “I have never understood how dance and music can be defined through religious categorizations – what is Hindu dance and what is Islamic dance?”
However, the Guardian story also points out that the song has been criticized because of “Sethi’s privilege – he is from an elite, educated family in Lahore, was educated at Harvard and now lives in New York – has given him and his music a platform not afforded to many other Pakistan artists.”
Another issue that the story raises but which is not discussed in the Guardian item is that the song and associated video were produced by the Coke Studios, a channel sponsored by Coca Cola in Pakistan. The video acts as an advert for the brand. It is part of Coca Cola’s strategy to promote the brand image in global youth markets. Coca Cola wants to be seen as being on the side of the angels and to be promoting mutual understanding between communities.
The questions I wish to raise in relation to this story are whether it constitutes an example of multiculturalism, of cosmopolitanism and what does it say about the cultural effects of globalisation.
A critique of multiculturalism
In the relatively culturally liberal and politically neoliberal 1990s, the term “multiculturalism” acquired a largely positive connotation associated with a celebration of diversity. In this guise it began to inform public policy in a variety of areas including education, employment, and cultural activities.
I began to have doubts about whether the term was as constructive as liberal opinion would have it because of my experience of teaching at the University of East London. UEL’s student body was composed largely of local students, many of them mature and from unconventional educational backgrounds who had entered the university as a result of its efforts to increase access to higher education of non-traditional social groups. UEL’s student population ethnic and cultural mix mirrored largely that of the population of East London which by then had experienced a large influx of immigrants from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. They had joined the remnants of what I have been designating in these blogs as the old working class who had stayed in the area in the aftermath of its deindustrialisation. I had lived through and experienced this process of economic restructuring of the regional economy. The London Borough of Barking, where I lived for 12 years and where UEL had a campus until the year 2000, became the focus of racial tensions and notorious nationally for a surge in electoral support for the British National Party (BNP) amongst the remnants of the traditional white working class in 2006.
I was able to observe the huge and often conflicting pressures our students were subject to from a variety of sources. These included their often very conservative and traditional families tied to religious affiliations acquired in their country of origin, the social contacts and friendships created with fellow students from very different backgrounds to their own, the racism present in the wider society of which they were often victims and, not least, the ideas and knowledge they were acquiring in the course of their education, ideas whose source was often a long way away from the cultural background from which they had emerged. This would even apply to the significant number of local students from an industrial working class background which UEL was able to recruit through its Access courses.
We had a considerable number of students from Muslim families. They were particularly affected by the growth of Islamophobia in the country, particularly in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the twin towers in New York. I was led to think about the complexity of the issues they faced by a conversation I had with a mature female student from a Muslim family, an extremely strong and aware woman and a feminist who nevertheless always wore a hijab. I asked her why. She said that she wore it in solidarity with fellow members of the community who wanted to wear it and who were being vilified for it. She also felt that failure to wear it would make it impossible for her to intervene effectively within her community to influence it with her own ideas.
I felt new cultures and new identities were being developed under very difficult circumstances and that it was incumbent on the University to help them in the process. When I was involved in the development of the new Docklands campus which opened in 2000, I proposed to the UEL leadership that we should present the university to our students as a cultural space in which to openly debate and work out the multiple pressures to which their identities were being subjected. Unfortunately, the proposal was met with total incomprehension.
In this context, I was at the same time witnessing how the concept of multiculturalism ostensibly introduced to combat a nativist view of nationality and meant to celebrate diversity was being put into practice by public policy. Schools, for instance, were trying to balance the celebration of Christian religion which they already practiced, with the celebration of religious festivals of other religions.
The remnants of the local industrial working class had never particularly identified themselves through religion. This was in any case increasingly less practiced. The sudden celebration of what was being presented as the culture of the newcomers when their own was being ignored made them feel marginalised. This attracted many to the political pronouncements of the far right. The BNP won 11 council seats in the 2006 local elections in the London Borough of Barking. Local Labour MP and then employment minister Margaret Hodges claimed that in the run up to the election 8 out of 10 voters had been contemplating voting for the BNP.
It seemed to me that, far from celebrating the intermixing of culture to create a dynamic sense of a national culture, official policy was trying to place the various cultures into separate boxes defined to a large extent by the religious beliefs and practices which were being contested by the progressive elements within the communities. Tony Blair ended up treating the Muslim Council of Great Britain, a highly conservative and retrograde organisation, as the prime spokesgroup of the Muslim community. This even motivated a protest by Salmon Rushdie who called on all Muslims who did not wish to be defined primarily by religion and be represented by the Muslim Council of Britain to speak up.
The humiliation of the remnants of the old industrial working class by the New Labour establishment was compounded when it adopted and lauded the concept of the knowledge economy. This implicitly denigrated the manufacturing economy which had created that working class. In a speech on “Creativity in the Knowledge Economy” delivered in June 2004 in Canary Wharf, then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Patricia Hewitt lauded the development of this economy and referred to the Canary Wharf development as a fitting backdrop to her remarks because it was “a symbol of the vision and commitment to create world-leading cluster in a location where few thought it possible (my emphasis)”.
I was moved to denounce this by researching and writing a celebration of the pioneering history of the East London radio and electronics industry which had spawned radio broadcasting and the BBC (Creative East London in Historical Perspective). It also celebrated East London as the cradle of the British labour and trade union movement.
When researching for this blog post, I was very encouraged to find that similar negative thoughts on the political effects of the adoption of multiculturalism as normative concept had already been developed and expressed a long time ago by an Observer commentator, Kenan Malik. On 17 March 2010, in an article entitled ‘Multiculturalism undermines diversity’, Malik wrote
As a political policy, multiculturalism’s desire to put people in boxes has left many minorities feeling misrepresented – The experience of living in a society transformed by mass immigration, a society that is less insular, more vibrant and more cosmopolitan, is positive. As a political process, however, multiculturalism means something very different. It describes a set of policies, the aim of which is to manage diversity by putting people into ethnic boxes, defining individual needs and rights by virtue of the boxes into which people are put, and using those boxes to shape public policy. It is a case, not for open borders and minds, but for the policing of borders, whether physical, cultural or imaginative.
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
The intellectual roots of multiculturalism
The preceding critical remarks relate to the way the concept has been interpreted by liberal politicians. I was, however, unclear whether the way multiculturalism had been construed to inform policy had been a misinterpretation of a concept which had previously been developed by academics whose work I hadn’t followed as cultural studies aren’t my specialism. I decided to investigate.
I was already aware that the most important intellectual figure associated with the concept was Stuart Hall. He is widely referred to in the media as the ‘godfather of multiculturalism’, a term that was used in most headlines associated with the many obituaries that were written following his death in 2014. To what extent could the policy interpretation of the term be justified by the way Hall had addressed it?
In researching the question, I was soon surprised to find that the “godfather of multiculturalism” didn’t in fact like the term. He found its meaning very unclear and ‘so discursively entangled that it can only be used “under erasure.”’1 . Hall defines multiculturalism as the term which ‘references the strategies and policies adopted to govern or manage the problems of diversity and multiplicity which multicultural societies throw up’ and goes on to argue that insofar as there are a multitude of such possible strategies, its meaning is unclear. In a subsequent interview, Hall explicitly says he doesn’t like the term. However, as it has become so widely used, Hall feels that we have no choice but to engage with it.
Hall’s definition of multiculturalism fits well with the interpretation of the term which I arrived at and critiqued. Hall also highlights the problem that Malik and I identified that political use of the term tends to reduce it to a formula in which ‘the heterogeneity characteristic of multi-cultural conditions is reduced to a pat and pedestrian doctrine’2 The problems that the ‘multicultural condition’ poses to the definition of national identity are discussed, but Hall doesn’t seem to question the necessity for such a definition or raise the possibility that the ‘multicultural condition’ might make such a definition impossible, a prospect I have ben raising in this blog. 3 Traditional national identity is largely comfortable with Britain’s imperial past, whilst the new working class is challenging its cultural influence.
Interim conclusion
The concept of multiculturalism is problematic insofar as it tends to create the need to define what are the core constituents of each of the cultures that contribute towards the term. This gives the word “culture” a static rather than a dynamic sense and fails to capture the positive nature of the process of cultural creation through the intermixing of cultures as exemplified by the story of the Pasoori song and video. It may even be partly responsible for stoking sterile and polarising discussion in the culture wars. A new term is needed to symbolise this progressive process. Could the “cosmopolitanism” fit the bill?
Also, it could be argued that Pasoori is a product of globalisation. It is giving globalisation a good name. However, globalisation is generally vilified by the political left as it is associated with a neo-liberal ideology which glorifies the “free” market and denounces the role of the national state. Do we on the left need to rethink our attitude to globalisation and our positive view of the role of the national state? These are questions I will be addressing in my next post.
Alvaro de Miranda
Alvaro de Miranda is retired from the University of East London where he co-founded a Department of Innovation Studies. He came to the UK in 1958 aged 15 to join his parents who were exiles from the Salazar regime in Portugal. Having experienced fascism, he is particularly alarmed with the recent worldwide electoral rise of the far-right and has been following it comparatively in this blog.
2 June 2022
‘The Multicultural Question’ in Hall, Stuart. Essential Essays, Volume 2 : Identity and Diaspora, edited by David Morley, Duke University Press, 2019, p.95 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smnnj ↩
ibid, p.96 ↩
Hall seems to want Britain to create a concept of national identity in which everyone in Britain accepts, for instance, that being black is consistent with being British. I, on the other hand, have being arguing that this may be currently impossible in a situation of generalised crisis. This has been demonstrated by the controversies surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement (see my blog posts on this issue) and the rise in popularity of far right nationalist sentiments associated with Brexit and the success of Trump, in the UK and US. Similar phenomena are occurring in most Western countries. ↩